August 12, 2016

"At her Brooklyn concert last night, Barbra Streisand was accompanied by an elastic band."

Emails an old friend, linking to The New York Times. And sure enough, here's what got past the NYT copy editors:
Backed by an elastic band and aided by teleprompters, she spent a lot of her more than two hours onstage explaining the stories behind songs and performances and album covers.

7 comments:

YoungHegelian said...

Add a tub bass & blow across a whisky jug, & you'd have "Streisand does Hillbilly".

Hey, if she can sing Debussy chansons, she can branch out & sing "You ain't woman enough to take my man".

madAsHell said...

When is she going to retire......again?

toxdoc said...


Hey ya'll prepare yourself for the rubberband man
You've never heard a sound
Like the rubberband man
You're bound to lose control
When the rubberband starts to jam

Fernandinande said...

If anyone wants aerial photos of her Malibu mansion, email me.

wildswan said...

The whole article uses dated metaphors from the Seventies:

a space shuttle leaving Earth
movie clips
her dinner: “My pizza’s getting cold!”
a little highlight [movie] reel
Mission accomplished.
the tie he didn’t wear
crowd went cuckoo for him
that thing Hulk Hogan would do
the female director who was made to suffer for daring to do what men had always done

So as I read I thought that author probably sent in the words "elastic band" as if to say he was so dated that he thought maybe that's what that kind of band was called.

But then, rather cleverly, the author suddenly asks whether Streisand is all nostalgia all the time or whether some women get past being dated and if they do, how does that happen? "Nostalgia has always been built into her catalog. But can she make the distant past vital again?" and answers "Certain women of the pre-music-video era can now seemingly go on forever."

Incredible though it seems, if you become the Seventies icon people will go to your show to participate in a past that isn't theirs, to be in the Seventies for awhile. Soon they'll collect disco balls. And I wonder who will be the Millenial icon?

rehajm said...

Remember when her stage fright kept her from appearing in public?

I sure remember...

khematite said...

The original Elastik Band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pth2kQHUIyw

And just to tie into the offensive words theme, it's their 1967, career-ending song "Spazz."